A construção de uma cidade: segregação e desigualdades socioespaciais em Cataguases, Minas Gerais

Abstract

Brazilian cities noticeably have spaces of segregation and socio-spatial inequalities that are, on the one hand, occupied by wealthy or middle-class people, which are well-infra-structured, provided with services, commerce, mobility, public and community facilities and, on the other hand, by others with total absent, precarious or difficult access to any amenities, where the low-income population lives. This research work investigates how that segregation and sociospatial inequalities are produced, how they become a natural process and the factors that determine them during the whole process of construction and formation of a city. The hypothesis assumed is that there is an inseparable and intrinsic relationship between social and spatial organization that is linked to segregation and inequalities, turning them natural. From the interchange between space and time, we seek to work on the dialectic and mediation interrelation between space and society, in a process of inseparability and connection between them. The spatial portion of the district headquarters of the City of Cataguases, in Minas Gerais, is used, from the village’s foundation in 1828 up to 2015. This research reveals that in Cataguases, segregation and socio-spatial inequalities - and how they become a natural process - are related to a type of social organization that has existed since its foundation, where economic and political powers directly or indirectly mingle and so shape and define how the city is formed. In that symbiosis between economic and political powers, public and private sectors are joined to bring privileges, preferences, moneymaking and better location in the city spaces to the ongoing economic powers.Segregation and inequalities became evident and were intensified after the industrialization period, when the low payment of workers have broken the socio-spatial organization of the city, which has mainly expanded along the slopes, with difficult access to its central area, and precarious infrastructure to house an increasing, low-income working population. Contrasting with a well infra-structured centrality that remains and was consolidated before the industrialization period, inhabited by wealthy and middle-class citizens. The case of Cataguases allowed us to verify that segregation and socio-spatial inequalities and how they become a natural process are linked to the intrinsic and inseparable relationships between the social and spatial organization and the dialectic and mediation relationship between space and society.